The present invention relates to a laboratory scale incinerator simulation system enabling a variety of liquid and solid materials to be combusted under various process conditions in order to predict incineration conditions in large commercial incinerators and optimum incinerating conditions therefor based on measurements of combustion byproducts and exit gases.
At the present time there has been increased effort to incinerate wastes in an environmentally acceptable and economic manner. This ideally requires using the optimum conditions to incinerate and, hence, optimization of incinerating conditions for a wide variety of different liquid and solid waste materials, such as rate of waste introduction into the incinerator, primary incinerating conditions, secondary treatment conditions, and the like, and their interrelationship. Also, there is no accurate system to predict emissions from the combustion of new waste products or waste streams to determine optimum conditions for incineration thereof, or whether, in fact, incineration is a viable method for disposing of the same.
At the present time, other than actual studies in large scale commercial incineration equipment in which it is difficult to vary the incineration parameters and to study the incineration byproducts because of the size of the equipment and the large volumes of byproducts, there is no satisfactory small scale system permitting accurate studies to be conducted under careful controlled conditions.
There is no economic, rapid, and accurate system enabling one to vary all the parameters of an incinerator in order to determine optimum incinerating conditions in large commercial scale incinerators for any given waste, liquid or solid. Moreover, the available pilot or laboratory scale equipment utilized generally is suitable only for batch or for continuous operation and it is not heretofore been possible to operate the same incinerator simulator system in both modes. Also, some systems are not capable of modeling both the primary and secondary combustion processes under different combustion conditions. Some current systems for incinerator simulation also do not have a separate air controls for primary and secondary combustions zones thus not permitting accurate control over these important combustion variables. As a consequence, large amounts of particulates produced during the combustion have introduced analytical' differences in prior systems. Such carbonaceous particulates have been implicated in dioxin formation as they may provide a catalytic surface and/or organic material for dioxin formation.
Further, many of the current systems have but one size combustion zone and as a consequence it is not possible to provide more accurate control for various combustibles with respect to the gas residence times in the combustion zone or to vary the size sample to be treated in such zone.